Forefront Fellow Alison Von Glinow won a Bee Breeders competition seeking to address the pressures of expanding populations and urban growth on existing housing markets in Hong Kong.
The first place proposal for the Hong Kong Pixel Home radically re-imagines the notion of vertical living, translating from the building scale to the individual unit typology. Rather than stack units floor to floor, each unit is layered and aggregated vertically, establishing a repetitive module, for adaptation to various sites in Hong Kong. By re-thinking the typical rental unit, the project re-postulates common urban housing, often internalized and tightly clustered per floor, left with little daylighting opportunity or exterior accessibility. As the unit progresses upward from floor to floor, the building envelope steps to maximize exterior exposure and increase availability of natural light. Organized in a nine square grid, the project takes full advantage of the perimeter, locating the public circulation at the core. Once aggregated, the receding volumes thread together varied perforations of outdoor space, providing both circulation and courtyard. The woven circulation offers opportunity for the chance encounter and shared narrative, re-imagining the idea of the street and neighborhood. The vertical stacking of individual units develops a new tower paradigm, taking advantage of amenities more commonly provided in the sprawling expanse of single family neighborhoods, while engaging the end user in direct dialogue with the scale of the city.
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Hong Kong Pixel Homes, Bee Breeders
Vertical Limit: Architects Reimagine Hong Kong’s High-Rise Housing, CNN